10 Calendar Management Tips To Reclaim Your Time

Your meetings are back-to-back. Your email inbox is overflowing. Admin tasks are piling up. There’s no time to breathe. Losing control of your calendar can lead to stress, missed opportunities, and burnout.

With calendar management tools and best practices, it’s possible to get that schedule back under control and achieve your professional goals. 

Here are proven calendar management tips that have worked for us and time management experts.

Your calendar is causing you headaches (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article!), but what specific problems are you encountering?

The right calendar management solutions depend on your type of work, your productivity style, workload and other factors. So it’s a good idea to think about exactly what issues you need to solve, and what you want your work life to look like. 

Your issues might be:

• Back-to-back meetings with no time to stop and think
• Constant fire-fighting of incoming emails
• Scheduling clashes on projects and deadlines
• Mental exhaustion from work overload

Your goals for calendar management might be along the lines of:

• Make more time for forward planning.
• Protect time for deep work.
• Finish on time on Friday to pick up kids from school.

Try making your own list and refer to it as you work through our tips.

Calendar management solutions let you create a beautiful-looking schedule in minutes,but a schedule is only useful if it’s realistic. It’s a good idea to spend some time considering how long you actually need for common tasks.

For example, if you usually schedule a half-hour for meetings, but spend 10 minutes afterwards updating notes, then consider allowing longer for each meeting.

Visual aids such as color-coding, icons and layout can help you spot patterns in your time management. Visual layouts also aid clear communication with teams.

Try color-coding different tasks in your calendar so you can see where you’re spending most time at a glance.

Icons and emojis can also represent tasks, clients, or locations. Productivity tools like Notion have dedicated icon fields that display in calendar view. If you’re using Google Calendar you can add an emoji in the event name field, and it will show up in your calendar.

Some types of schedule are particularly suited to a visual layout. For example, if you’re a student with a schedule that repeats weekly or monthly, you can build a visual student planner that shows the shape of your week at a glance.

It’s natural to be productive in short spurts as we often struggle to maintain focus for long periods. Taking regular breaks can help improve focus during work sprints.

You could try using the pomodoro technique as part of your schedule. This time-management approach uses a timer to split work into chunks, interspersed with short breaks. 

Most commonly, 25 minute work spurts are followed by 5 minute breaks, with longer breaks after every four spurts. You can adjust this to suit your personal preference.

There are a range of pomodoro apps available. Productivity platforms like Notion and Trello offer pomodoro add-ons.

But all you really need is a timer. You can keep a physical log of pomodoro spurts as a motivator. This example was built from a Piktochart template.

Are you a morning person? Do you tend to work best up against deadlines? Do you like bouncing ideas off others?

While you could build an “optimal” calendar system that others recommend, it’s best to take your personal work style into account. From there, build a calendar management system that plays to your strengths. For example, if mornings are when you’re most focused, block that time out for deep work, leaving the afternoons for admin and planning.

Encourage others to respect your structure by blocking out time. Use scheduling tools like Calendly to set your availability and add a link to your email signature.

Building down-time into our schedules can prevent burnout and boost productivity. Even a few minutes between Zoom calls to stretch and make a drink can help you stay focused.

To encourage yourself to schedule breaks, make them official events in your calendar. Color code break times so that you can check at a glance that you’re maintaining a good balance.

There are many calendar management tools out there – from the basics such as Google Calendar through to work management platforms like Calendly, Trello, Zoho, or Any.do. You can experiment to find out which solution best suits you.

You can also use a mix of solutions. For example, you could handle meeting scheduling with Doodle and task management with Asana, integrating both with Google Calendar as your central hub.

It’s useful to break up your tasks into stuff you do every day, or every week, verses one-off or project-based tasks. 

Rather than scheduling dailies and weeklies over and over again, you can batch-schedule them in advance. Productivity platforms like Notion or Trello can create recurring tasks that automatically generate.

Daily work can be repetitive, but you can boost productivity by creating positive feedback loops..

For example, to-do list tool Habitica makes ticking off tasks into a game by adding animations and completion noises and rewarding you with coins to spend on in-app icons!

However, you don’t need an app to gamify your productivity. You can stay old-school and set yourself goals and rewards. Clearing your email inbox gets you a cup of coffee and a cookie?

Good calendar management saves time, but it also takes time. If you make space set aside time to plan your schedule, you can stay ahead and make sure you stick to the good practices you’ve put in place. You could schedule time to plan your next week as your last task on a Friday afternoon.

Scheduling in time for forward planning is essential if you’re in charge of a workflow in a business. For example, if you’re responsible for your company’s social media content calendar, it’s important to block out time for planning content, not just creating it, so you stay on top of workload.

In addition to these tips for keeping your calendar in order, here These are some core time management concepts approaches to calendar management that can will help you be more productive.

Time blocking means scheduling tasks, not just appointments.

While standard calendars contain meetings and events, a time-blocked calendar includes periods for planning, emails, admin tasks, and deep work.  You can also block generic available time for future meetings.

This approach helps manage workload efficiently and ensures important tasks don’t get postponed. For example, it’s likely to be more efficient to answer emails during a specific time block rather than interrupting your flow to respond ad hoc.

You could incorporate time-blocking into your main calendar by creating events for each block. If this makes your calendar too crowded, you could create a separate time-block calendar you can toggle on and off. 

Or you could keep your time-block schedule completely separate, as in the above example in Notion.

We’ve all got too much to do. But prioritizing effectively ensures that essential tasks get done on time.

You can use a time-management tool like the Eisenhower Matrix to decide what gets calendar space. This is a method of categorizing tasks into one of four types:

• urgent and important
• urgent but not important
• important but not urgent
• neither urgent nor important.

Quickly evaluate each new task using the matrix, then work your way through the task list by order of urgency.

Urgent and important tasks are dealt with immediately. Important but not urgent tasks are scheduled. Not important but urgent tasks are delegated if possible. And not important and not urgent tasks are eliminated!

This approach may sound obvious, but evaluating tasks like this trains you to instantly prioritize.

Often our challenges with calendar management stem from the demands of others. To keep your calendar under your own control, it’s important to set clear boundaries. This might include:

• Protecting scheduled task time by not accepting meetings during those times.
• Learning to say ‘no’ politely to colleagues.
• Putting buffer periods between events to accommodate over-runs.
• Negotiating meeting times.

The key to effective boundary-setting is to respect your own time. When you block out sessions for planning, admin or breaks in your calendar, it can be easy to treat this time as up for grabs when something urgent comes in. 

Instead, treat those blocks as non-negotiable. Having that time marked off makes it easy for colleagues to see when you are available.

Calendar management requires ongoing attention. As part of your time-blocking, try putting in time for a weekly calendar management review. The end of the week is a good time for this. 

You can: look back at the last week to 

• assess what worked and what didn’t
• look ahead to plan the next week with those learnings in mind.
• look back at your list of pain points and goals. Is your time management aligning with goals and solving headaches?
•  If not, consider tweaks to address the issue if not.

The sheer number of time management tools out there can be overwhelming, but we’ve got you covered with a brief guide to the tools you might find useful.

These form the foundation of your calendar management system. 

The advantage of a core calendar is that you can consolidate information from several sources into one place.

External applications can be plugged in to core calendars to update automatically. For example, task management tools like Slack or Trello can synch with Google Calendar or Outlook so that tasks populate the calendar.

Examples: Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple iCloud Calendar.

These services help you manage your calendar by automating elements of your scheduling. You can use them to create recurring tasks, to block out time for tasks, or to set your availability so that you control when others can book time with you.

Examples: Calendly, SavvyCal and Acuity Scheduling (for appointment booking).

You can harness AI to optimise your calendar with tools that utilise smart scheduling, spot patterns and make the most of available time.These tools can help you schedule habits and focus time into your calendar too.

Examples: Clockwise, Reclaim.ai

While digital scheduling tools are powerful, sometimes a visual schedule on your wall provides the best overview. You can see everything at a glance, giving a clearer picture of what’s happening.

Visual planners excel for sharing project overviews with teams. You can use Piktochart’s planner templates to create clear weekly or monthly overviews for yourself, or to share with your team. 

This example shows a month at a glance, highlighting key meetings, time off and blocking for deep work.

Calendar management is the process of using a calendar to organize your time to be most effective.  It goes beyond simply booking slots. Organizational tools, prioritizing and optimization improve efficiency and align with goals.

Poor calendar management can be costly, especially for a small business where people are likely to be taking on several admin roles. The results can include lowered productivity, stress and burnout, and missed opportunities.

Good calendar management can transform work output and mental wellbeing. One study found that time management positively impacts wellbeing and even life satisfaction.

Benefits can include:

• increased focus time for deep work
• Reduced meeting fatigue
• better alignment with key goals.

• Prioritize ruthlessly. Make sure you align with your set goals.
• Block out times when you’re available with a platform like Calendly, and have a meeting booking link in your email signature.
• Don’t be afraid to politely decline or delegate non-essential meetings.
• Is a meeting really needed? Suggest async communication (email, Slack update) if face-to-face isn’t essential.

If you’re part of a team with a shared calendar, try these tips for keeping it under control:

• Establish clear team protocols. These might include deciding who adds what to the calendar, setting out naming conventions for tasks and events, and deciding what information is mandatory.
• Make use of shared availability views using a platform such as Monday.com, Café or Google Workspace so that people can see at a glance when others are available. This cuts down on back-and-forth scheduling queries.
• Consider appointing a designated calendar owner/point person for complex scheduling.
• Integrate your shared calendar with project management tools to increase visibility.